


if all your gravity did not hit me

by AndreaLyn



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-26 02:05:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19758382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: One strange night in 1997, the entire world wakes up to find circular marks on their arms that don't seem to match anyone else's. Soon enough, people start to find their match and discover just what that means.





	if all your gravity did not hit me

**Author's Note:**

> The symbols in the story are basically a mix between [Gallifreyan](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c0/2d/31/c02d319358571edb843740a03ce226d5.jpg) and the language from [Arrival](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8N6HT8hzUCA/maxresdefault.jpg).
> 
> ENDLESS thanks to islndgrl777 for the beta! Title comes from _Honeybee_ by Head and the Heart.

It happens when Alex is reading a comic with the flashlight under the covers.

One minute, he’s in the middle of Spider-Man’s adventures and the next, he looks down and finds a mark on his forearm. It’s circular and filled with greys and blacks. It looks a little like a tattoo, but he hadn’t even felt it happen. Alex puts down his flashlight, puts down his comic, and pushes two fingers against the mark, feeling a spark of _something_ pushing back, like Alex has put out the call and someone answered.

Before he can do it again, he hears his mother shouting from the living room. “Jesse! Something’s happened…” 

“Dad…” He hears Flint outside of his room and Alex watches him walk past, rubbing his arm. “What is it? What’s on my arm?”

Alex pushes against it again and the same feeling comes back. 

It’s _curiosity_ , and Alex stares at his arm and wonders if Flint and his parents would feel the same if they poked at it. Until he knows better, he huddles around himself to protect it, because it’s _his_. It happened to him and it’s his.

* * *

It happens when Liz is helping Rosa in the back kitchen (even though seven-year-olds aren’t allowed to be back here) with the dishes, pushing them into the sink so they can be washed. One moment, she’s on a step stool and her arms are submerged in soapy water, the next when she pulls them out, there’s something dark on her inner forearm.

“Ew, Rosa,” Liz complains. “What did you put in the sink?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Rosa huffs with a roll of her eyes, but she clambers down to grab a towel to wipe off the soap from Liz’s arm.

The soap and the water come away.

The mark doesn’t.

“Rosa…” 

Liz looks at her sister’s arm. There’s a mark there too. It hadn’t hurt. She hadn’t felt anything and now as she steps down, Rosa takes hold of her arm the same moment that Liz grabs her sister’s. They’re not the same, but they’re so similar and Liz stares, entranced, at how beautiful it looks. 

“Girls,” their father sounds panicked as he rushes downstairs. “Girls, come here.” 

“Papi, what is it?” Rosa asks, tracing her own mark.

Liz, never to be outdone, does the same. She runs her thumb in circles along the edges and when she presses on it, she feels _afraid_. It’s not her fear, though. She’s worried and confused and curious, but not afraid. 

She’s holding someone else’s fear for them and even as their father rounds them up to bundle them into the bedroom, wanting to examine the marks, Liz keeps pressing on hers. For hours, there’s only fear, but eventually, there’s something else. 

_Determination_. 

Curling up with Rosa under the covers of their hastily made blanket fort, Liz closes her eyes and basks in that feeling, letting it wash over her as she falls asleep.

* * *

It happens to everyone around the world. 

One night, out of nowhere, every single person develops a mark on their wrist. They’re all patterns within circles and at first glance, they look identical, but it’s Kyle who points out that there are minute little differences. The dots and lines and whorls and swirls vary, just slightly. No two people have the same mark.

No one knows what they are.

“I heard on the news,” Liz shares, when they’re all collected together on the playground, comparing them. “It happened to everyone at exactly the same time, but no one knows why or how!”

None of their symbols match. Between Maria, Liz, Kyle, and Alex, none of them have patterns that are exactly the same. Alex already knows that the ones his family have aren’t the same, still reeling from how his father had made them all line up so he could inspect them and take documented photos of each one.

He’d stared at them, muttering under his breath about _aliens_ , but Alex’s older brothers had pushed him back to his room before holing up in the study with Dad. 

The point is that no one understands them, not even his Dad, who always acts like he has the answer to everything, and Alex isn’t sure why that makes him feel better, but it does. Even at seven, Alex has seen what happens when his father acts like he’s in control of everything in the world.

It doesn’t end well for him. 

The next week, two new students are introduced. Isobel and Max Evans. They don’t speak for a few months, but when they do, they have a tendency to huddle together. Liz befriends Max and over the time she spends with him, she begins to notice that there’s a chance that her mark and Max’s mark are identical, but she’s sure she’s probably just missing a little dot or mark.

“Are you sure?” Alex asks, because no one’s match. 

That’s the point. Everyone has their own unique mark and when you push down on it, it makes you feel like you belong. It makes you feel warm and safe and curious. 

“I don’t know,” Liz admits, but she keeps tracing her mark and wearing a private little smile, like she has a secret she doesn’t plan to tell anyone. 

Four years later, Michael Guerin joins their school and instantly flocks to Max and Isobel’s side. He wears long sleeves, always. Alex has known plenty of people who do that to protect their marks – some are ashamed, some just don’t like the way they look, and some just want the privacy – and it looks like Michael Guerin does it, though for which of the three reasons, Alex doesn’t know. He’s not going to pry into Michael Guerin’s secrets.

He has secrets of his own to worry about now. At eleven, Alex is starting to realize that he might not be like everyone else, and this time, he’s not so sure being unique is so wonderful. With his mother gone and his father’s watchful, disapproving eye on him, Alex’s desire to be different is wavering.

It’s not gone, though.

He’s just letting it go quiet for a while.

* * *

Alex is thirteen when the first real theories about the marks make it to the worldwide news. He’s been absently stroking his mark in between songs on the guitar, feeling that flood of warmth that always comes when he does that.

“What we’ve found is a high percentage of matching marks between extremely compatible romantic partners.”

“Would you call them soulmates?” the presenter asks the scientist.

“In a manner of speaking, we believe that something is connecting these people. The marks appear to be a way of manifesting that connection to allow us to understand our best matches. We still don’t know how they developed or what prompted the instigating event…” Alex closes his eyes, drifting back and forth as he hums the bridge of the song he’s working on. He picks up his guitar again, but he gets three chords in before Jesse’s voice floats up from downstairs. “It’s past curfew, Alex. I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t make noise past curfew.” 

He sets the guitar down, paralyzed in place. 

When he touches the mark, buried under his covers, he could swear that for the first time, it’s not just a feeling. He swears that there are words, that he can _feel_ them in his head, but he’s not the one thinking them.

_It’s okay_ is this overwhelming sense he gets, as if those words will float into his vision at any point, like synesthesia, even though he can feel the edge of panic and hysteria, and Alex isn’t sure where his ends and the invading feeling begins. _It’s okay. It’s going to be okay._

“It’s okay,” Alex repeats out loud, and he’s fairly sure he’s saying it because he has no other mantra. “It’s okay.” 

Maybe one day, it _will_ be okay, but that seems too hopeful for this moment.

* * *

He dismisses that news report and all the ones like it for years. 

It’s only when he’s seventeen that he starts paying attention to them, and it’s all because of Liz Ortecho. He’s minding his own business, writing lyrics in his notebook by the skate park, and then out of the corner of his eye, he sees trouble. Trouble, in this case, being Liz Ortecho dragging a boy who isn’t Kyle along with her.

It’s no secret that she and Kyle had broken up after the news reports had gone on about soulmates and through careful comparison, they’d decided they weren’t a match. Her dragging along an embarrassed looking Max Evans is definitely hot gossip, but Alex taps his pen against his notebook and goes back to writing.

Maybe this is just a rebound? Or maybe Liz has decided Alex needs more poetry in his life. 

“They match,” is what she says when they arrive at Alex’s side. He looks up from where he’s writing the latest set of lyrics to his evergreen song, the one he’s always working on, and tries to see any sign of bullshit in Liz’s expression.

There’s not a shred of it, so she really believes this, doesn’t she?

“Are you saying you think you two are soulmates?” Alex asks, with a dubious tone that he’s not so sure he actually feels. Over the years, he’s watched a lot of interviews with couples whose marks matched, but Alex thinks that a fine-pointed pen and a lot of belief can make people believe anything they want to.

Liz sticks out her arm and grabs Max’s to do the same. 

“Hi Max,” Alex greets him with a smirk, seeing as he’s definitely blushing and looks embarrassed to be dragged out here like this. 

“Hey Alex,” Max replies, rubbing his free hand through his hair. “Uh, you can look at them, if you want? Liz always talks about how you’re really perceptive and M…” He trails off when Liz shoots him a warning look. 

Alex leans in and licks his thumb, rubbing it over Liz’s and then Max, just to make sure no one’s taken a pen to it. True, that won’t rule out a tattoo changing it, but there’d be marks and scarring and redness and there’s none of that. He traces every line, every circular pattern, every inky blotch, but there isn’t a single difference unless it’s on the microscopic level.

They match.

It’s not that he’s anti-romance or anything, but being the only gay kid in a small town like Roswell has taught Alex to grow a thick skin before people can cut him to pieces. For Liz, though, he can open up and be happy. 

“So what does all this mean? Wedding bells next week?” he teases.

“We were thinking milkshakes at the Crashdown. Little Green Man,” Liz says to Max, whose eyes widen in a panic for no reason Alex can think of, but it’s sweet that they’re together, and he’s more than a little relieved they’re not acting like those weirdos he sees on the news who find their match and run for the nearest chapel to get hitched.

Liz has always been too smart for that. He’s glad for them, he is. If all this stuff about matching marks is true, then it’s great, but, “Are you telling Maria next or am I just your extra special BFF and you had to tell me first?” 

Max and Liz exchange a look, like they’re keeping something from him, and all of a sudden, Alex isn’t sure he wants to hear what comes next, only he really does. Call him morbidly curious that way. “What?”

“We wanted to tell you, obviously,” Liz starts, “but it’s actually more about the marks than it is about me and Max being together.” She’s tugging her sleeve back down, Max doing the same, leaving them both to stare at Alex.

It’s really fucking unnerving, is what he’s learning.

“What about the marks?” Alex asks, and wonders why they’re suddenly so interested in him in relation to them. 

“I know what Michael’s mark looks like,” Max says, slowly. 

He and Isobel Evans are probably the only two who do. It’s a really odd statement for Max to be making out of nowhere.

“Okay,” Alex says slowly, not sure where this is going. “And?”

“And, when Liz was showing me yearbook pictures of the marks page for the senior yearbook, I had to do a double-take because there was no way in hell Michael would ever let his mark get photographed,” Max keeps going as white noise invades Alex’s head, making the next words out of Max’s mouth sound tinny and distant, “but then Liz told me that it was your mark, not Michael’s.”

He hears his notebook hit the ground, papers slipping out. He doesn’t remember letting it go, but the papers are floating in the wind, which snaps him to attention. “Shit!” he says, reaching for them. “Don’t let them fly away!” he says, scrambling to pin them down while trying not to think about the idea that someone has a matching mark.

No, it’s not just that.

It’s wrapping his head around the idea that the boy he has a stupidly big crush on happens to have a mark that matches his. Once Max and Liz have pressed the last of the papers into his hands, Alex shoves them back into his portfolio and stares at each of them, hovering between being pissed off and giddy that they told him.

“Does Michael know?”

“He was our next stop,” Max admits. “Unless you don’t want him to be?”

Alex tightens his fingers on his music. “Don’t tell him.” 

He figures if they really are connected, then Michael deserves to hear it from Alex. It’s still an _if_ , of course, because Liz and Max could be wrong. They could just be trying to make things easier for the both of them (because he knows all the rumors about Michael, how he’s homeless and sleeps in his truck). It could be some weird matchmaking attempt, but Alex has had a crush on Michael long enough that it’s worth finding out.

“Good luck,” Liz tells him, squeezing his shoulder.

“You’re the ones who need it,” Alex retorts, holding his notebook to his chest. “Soulmates,” he teases, shaking his head. Who would have ever thought? 

And yet, that little blossoming hope in his chest reminds Alex that he’s thought it before. He’s thought about it so often in his fantasies, but in those dreams he’s always escaping Roswell and finding his soulmate in some nameless town where no one knows his father or his past. He can’t lie and say he’s never daydreamed about Michael being his soulmate, but even then, it doesn’t happen like this.

He taps his fingers a few times against the mark and lets the overwhelming sensation of _peace_ wash over him before he gets to his feet to search for Michael.

* * *

Alex finds Michael in the school gym, which is halfway through its transition from a normal gym to a magical prom wonderland. Whatever his mark might be, it’s hidden under his de facto hoodie, and he’s sitting on a bench, playing Alex’s guitar. 

He lets out a soft scoff as he approaches, tilting his head to one side and raising his eyebrows. 

“I was gonna put it back,” Michael replies to Alex’s unasked comment. He doesn’t even look up, playing the bridge of a song that he shouldn’t know.

By rights, Michael should have no idea what that song is. Here he is though, playing something that Alex has been writing since he was thirteen, playing the bridge like he knows it intimately, from every chord to every rest to every perfect note and harmony. Alex reaches into his notebook and he pries out the exact piece of music that Michael is playing right now.

In the process, he stretches his arm out, which means that his shirt slips and shows off his mark. Once he’s set the music down, he pushes at the cuff of the sleeve to nudge it all the way up so that he can turn it towards Michael.

“You shouldn’t know that song.”

“I dream about it,” Michael says defensively. The tune has gone slow, and his eyes are fixed on Alex’s arm, brow furrowed as he catalogues it. 

Alex already knows what he’s doing. He’s looking for differences, trying to find a single mark that seems out of place so he doesn’t have to admit the truth. Alex’s heart is in his chest, because Michael might tell him that Liz and Max were wrong; that they missed a dot, a dash, a smudge of a line.

The discordant sound of the guitar strings fills his mind when Michael presses his palm over them, the song over. “Alex,” Michael says, his tone even. “Are you telling me that I know that song because of you?” His eyes have drifted from Alex’s mark to the sheet music, which means that his study is over.

Alex rubs two fingers in circles around the edge of the mark, closing his eyes when he feels the bridge opening up between them. This time, there’s _hope_ , even if uncertainty bleeds around the edges, like Michael isn’t so sure.

“They match?” Alex asks.

“I’d have to do a way more in-depth study to…”

“Do you think they match?” Alex asks again, because whether they actually match is a different question. He’s asking if Michael _thinks_ they do. He keeps rubbing his fingers around the mark, and he knows as soon as Michael makes his decision because the nervous sensation he feels changes to joy. 

The guitar is carefully rested in his lap and Michael slides up his sleeve reveal his own mark. 

“I’ve wanted them to since sophomore year, but I never thought…” Michael ducks his head down, scoffing as he shakes his head. “I didn’t think I’d ever be so lucky to get something I wanted.” 

Alex has drifted in to stand between Michael’s legs. He reaches for the neck of the guitar and he sets it aside very carefully, because he doesn’t want to damage it, but he has something so much more important that he wants to do right now. 

“What if that something you wanted is something that I need?” 

Michael tips his head to the side, his eyes fixed on Alex, and he looks nervous. It’s like he doesn’t want to believe that he gets to have this, but Alex is absolutely going to go to every length to make sure that he can convince him of that. 

He wraps his arms around Michael’s neck, heart pounding in his chest. They’re doing a lot of talking, which is good, but talking isn’t what he wants to do right now. 

“Well,” Michael quips, “Maybe I need someone to kiss me.”

“Right now? Or for the rest of your life?”

Michael gives him a thoughtful look from where he’s perched. “Let’s start with one and work our way up to a thousand,” he says, though his brash and confident words are belied by the nerves Alex can feel pulsing through him when he rubs his hand over his mark, drifting in for that very first kiss, which is as slow and sweet as the melody he’d been writing, but makes him feel more alive than music ever has.

One kiss down, he thinks as he eases back and laughs with the carefree sound of a man who’s finally learning that he doesn’t have to give up on all his hopes and dreams. When Michael laughs too, Alex can’t help it. 

There go kisses two through ten in quick succession.

Getting to a thousand is going to be no problem at this rate.

* * *

Alex is twenty-seven when he comes home to a news report that says they have the answer to the marks. He drops the groceries off on the counter, turning up the volume on the television (even though Michael usually keeps it on as nothing more than background noise).

“It’s remarkable, we’ve located the epicenter of their creation…” The maps flash on screen with red dots over Roswell, New Mexico, and a date that Alex will always remember, because it’s the date that he’d first seen his mark. It’s another important day, which he’d learned in the last decade. 

“Michael, babe,” he calls out to him in the cabin, but he gets no response. Shaking his head, Alex goes to the study and digs through the files, glancing back to where he’d paused the news to make sure the date is on the screen. He hasn’t thought about it in years, but now that they’re talking about it, the pieces are all coming together. 

In the background, the television drones on.

“Are you saying that the marks we all have are because of extra-terrestrial interference from a crash that happened years ago?”

“It seems that something was released into the atmosphere that night, which we isolated to a cave in New Mexico.” The footage is grainy, given the darkness of the caves, but it’s impossible not to make out three distinct iridescent pods. Well, there goes Alex and Michael’s picnic spot. 

That Michael is an alien isn’t new information. Alex has known about that since he was twenty-one and he and Michael got married before Alex shipped out for his tour. He’s grown used to his alien husband’s powers, his maybe-possibly siblings, and even his penchant for acetone. Michael being an alien with powers is just a part of him, the same as Alex and his prosthetic and his trauma from his last tour are a part of _him_.

What is new is the idea that the marks are somehow _because_ of Michael and his siblings.

Alex hears keys jangling in the front hall and their dog’s barking, which means Michael is back from wherever he’d taken Lyra for her walk. 

“Hey, sorry, she really wanted to go out,” Michael calls, glancing at his phone and wiggling it in the air. “How come I have ten missed calls from the group?”

Alex reaches for the remote to turn the volume up on the television, gesturing to it as he bends down to pat Lyra while she slobbers messy kisses against his hand. Michael perches against the counter, staring at the television as Alex turns up the volume so he can see the tail end of the report. 

“There’s no way the whole world is gonna believe aliens are real,” Michael scoffs. “I mean, this is hardly proof.”

“They believe in soulmates now,” Alex counters. “Why not aliens? Plenty of people already do. Besides, you know that we can’t ignore the fact that they tracked something.” He lets Lyra run off, giving him a fond look. “Michael, you’re missing the point. This is you. This is you and Max and Isobel,” he says, in disbelief and overwhelmed with that.

From the age of seven, he’d been given a map to his soulmate and it had come _from Michael_. Young, scared, and dreading his future, it had been something so crucial that he really thinks it had made all the difference. Michael had done that. Willingly or not, Michael had done that.

He looks fairly sheepish about it. “I don’t really remember that night,” he admits. “I don’t remember doing anything…”

“You gave me a map to you,” Alex cuts him off. “Michael…”

Michael leans in and cups Alex’s cheeks to kiss him, cutting off the continued gratitude Alex had been planning to offer. “Come on. We don’t need to think about what this means or what everyone else thinks.” He nods towards the bedroom, and raises his brows. “Do you wanna…?”

It's a stupid question, because Alex _always_ wants. He lets Michael tug him along (only once every last grocery is put away), laughing as he follows, and thinks about his mark and how it's made him the happiest man in the world, even though it’s never been _perfect_. Alex lets Michael take him apart, put him back together, and then do it again until Alex rests sated in their marriage bed, with Michael absently running his fingers over Alex’s chest, pressing slow kisses in the wake of his fingertips. 

By now, they must have broken past at least five thousand kisses, but then, Alex plans to make sure they easily achieve ten thousand. 

“We’ll have to be extra careful,” Michael mumbles, which is hardly very sexy post-coital talk, but Alex knows when Michael gets going, the best thing to do is just to let him talk it out. “Them finding out about our pods means that we need to lay low.”

“I know.”

“And we’ll have to make sure no one can get in there again. Maybe a rockslide?” Michael keeps going, which Alex already figured would have to happen. He starts tracing his fingers over Michael’s mark, rubbing it in circles. “It’s too dangerous. Or we could move one of the pods to the bunker first, then I can still study it, then cause the rockslide.”

“Hey, I know,” Alex promises. He presses his fingers to his mark, allowing that confidence and sureness flood through Michael, so he can make sure his husband knows that he doesn’t have a single doubt in him. “We’ll make sure that no one gets hurt. The world just wants to know where these marks came from. No one’s angry.”

“Only curious,” Michael agrees darkly.

“Someone else used to be curious,” Alex reminds him, draping his arm around Michael to coax him in for a kiss. “The very first time I touched my mark, all I felt was someone’s curiosity shouting back at me. You wouldn’t happen to know who that was?” he asks, faux-innocent. 

It's enough to drag Michael from that path towards darkness. He huffs out a laugh and shifts so he can rest his cheek against Alex’s chest, right where he’ll be able to feel his heartbeat.

“I keep thinking it’s gonna turn out badly.”

“That’s not up to us,” Alex murmurs, sliding his fingers through Michael’s hair. “We found each other because of the marks. We’re finally back together and we’re going to take advantage of the time we have. Yeah, we should move the pods and bar the access,” he agrees. “You and Max and Iz will have to lay low,” he says, “but that doesn’t change our connection, any of ours.” He keeps working his fingers against Michael’s scalp in that way he knows he loves so much. “Can we do that? Can we just focus on us?”

Michael gives Alex an annoyed look from where he’s lying, but Alex knows it’s only for show. 

“Fine,” he sighs. “Only because I love you.”

“Oh, _only_.”

To stop Michael from making a single other protest, he tilts up his chin so he can shut him up with a kiss, grinning as he eases back, feeling the love flow between the two of them, connecting them through a bond they’ve had since they were children – a bond that Michael himself had somehow created. 

Alex doesn’t know how or why, whether out of love or loneliness, but truthfully, he doesn’t care. He gets this, and that makes the rest irrelevant.

* * *

It happens when they came out of their pods.

Young, confused, and new to the world, the three little aliens didn’t know what to make of the strange circular marks on their arms or the sudden burst of energy and power that seemed to pulse out from the pods behind him, as though fifty years of _something_ had finally been released into the atmosphere.

Their only goal is survival and something that pushes them towards the town. It’s as if something down there (or someone, not that they know it yet) is calling to them and pulling them in. They didn’t have language, but they had a connection to one another and somehow, to Roswell. 

The youngest touched his and felt _curiosity_ about who was on the other end. 

The eldest twin rested a hand over his own and felt _determination_ to ignore the marks and get through the night.

The girl didn’t touch hers, because her brother held out his hand to her. Together, they joined their hands and began to walk towards that connection that pulled them in, somehow seeming more powerful than any earthly force.

Not that they know it, not then, but when they get a little older, they learn the name for it along with all the other words in the language that surrounds them. That connection, that pull, that thing that pulled them in has one very clear name and it stays with them through their whole lives.

It’s love, and on that night, their marks embedded on their skins at the same time as a whole world’s population.


End file.
